Missing

The Parent Trap

Missing
USA 2023
Directed by
Nicholas D. Johnson & Will Merrick
Stage 6 Films

Warning: Some slight spoilers here...

Missing is one of those fairly newish (maybe not so new anymore) subgenres of movies which are all set on one person’s computer laptop. They’re more often than not horror movies but, this one is a thriller. And I have to confess that I almost completely steered clear of this one since, to me, it looked like a rip off of a movie I quite liked from a few years ago called Searching (reviewed here). However, after a few weeks, I discovered (and with no thanks to the advertising campaign which obviously didn’t work on me) that it’s actually a sequel or, more accurately, follow up to that movie, written and directed by the editors (and one producer) of Searching. So I was immediately in again.

And, yeah, it is pretty much more of the same but it’s mostly being quite smart about how it delivers the information needed to decode the mystery behind the story although, it has to be said, not nearly as smart as in the first one.

This one is all about a teenager called June (or June Bug, as her mum calls her) played by Storm Reid, who is left alone in her mum’s house for a week while her mother, Grace, played by Nia Long, goes off on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend (ten or so years after June’s dad dies from an unspecified medical condition). However, Grace and her boyfriend Kevin (played by Ken Leung) don’t return from vacation and, despite the worst efforts of the FBI, it’s down to June, with some unlikely help from a guy called Javi (played by Joaquim de Almeida), who is her ‘man on the spot’ in Columbia, to try and track her missing parent down.

Like the first movie, this film is all created by panning around June’s laptop, with lots of open windows of her talking on Skype so we can see her face once in a while and, yeah, it’s nicely done, with a few caveats. It follows a similar patter to the first movie in terms of some of the reveals and, though I didn’t see the biggest reveal coming, I was absolutely seeing most of the main twists way before they happen. The film does telegraph itself way more than Searching did. For instance, a stream of very briefly glimpsed photos sent from the vacation near the start of the movie were, to me, noteworthy in that Grace’s head was never turned towards the camera... so it seemed obvious to me that these were deliberately staged shots for the benefit of June and, to be honest, it takes June quite a while to figure that one out.

Sometimes the cleverness of some of the scenes is played with a little too much and it does kind of give things away. For example, there’s a really great bit at the start where some of the events of the first movie are being replayed and my immediate thought was... hey, that’s not the same actor. This is then completely explained in a lovely way, within a few seconds... but I won’t tell you how. However, the writers and directors then use exactly the same trick at the end of the movie and, frankly, as soon as a shot of rushing police cars starts off a sequence, I knew exactly what they were doing. So that’s a shame but, perhaps once would have been enough or, you know, maybe don’t repeat the trick in the same way because, there’s no surprise the second time around.

Another thing which bothered me is that the final scenes of the actual story (before the usual epilogue scenes) were, by necessity and because the film makers obviously didn’t want to cheat the audience, shown by panning around and zooming in on a network of security cam screens on June’s Macbook. Which is fine but the downside of that is that all of the scenes in that final ‘action sequence’ are very blurry as a result. I guess it’s certainly a trade off and the directors made the right choice to preserve the illusion, for sure. Although, like the first movie, it’s not trying to necessarily present itself as complete reality... for instance, the movie has a score on it to help increase and maintain the mood and tension of the piece.

Now, despite its faults, I really liked Missing and, I especially loved the character of Javi. I’m wondering if there’s any scope for a third film in the series which brings together one of the characters from both films to kind of round it off as a trilogy... and maybe make one of those protagonists twist out as the antagonist or some such. Either way, this film is nowhere near as good as Searching but certainly holds its own and is definitely worth a look. This format isn’t quite played out yet and I think it still has some legs on it. Let’s see if Hollywood will let it evolve. I’m sure these things must be very low budget, allowing for a good profit margin.